Direct-sown vegetable crops

 

Young rows of September-sown Eat-All Greens in early October. Direct sown in September. Photo Bridget Aleshire

I wrote a post recently that discussed transplanting, mainly as a way to get earlier crops in spring. Now I’m going to write about direct-sowing. This is the word for putting the seeds directly into the ground outdoors.

As with transplanting, some crops are just not going to thrive if you start too soon: cucumbers, peppers, and even tomatoes, for example. Make sure you can provide conditions that meet the minimum temperature requirements for these tender crops. See my book Sustainable Market Farming, for the details, and The Year-Round Hoophouse for a chart of germination temperatures, telling you how many days each crop will take to emerge at various temperatures. Buy a soil thermometer and push the stem all the way into the soil to measure at a depth of 4” (10 cm) I find it helpful to push the thermometer stem through a larger colorful plastic lid, or stake flag. And install it somewhere safe, where it won’t get stepped on, mowed, or tilled up.

Soil thermometer with colorful background to help us keep it safe,
Pam Dawling

March conditions have become more unreliable, often colder. For example, if the soil at 4” (10cm) deep is 40F (4.4C), you might do better to wait if your chosen crop will take more than 21 days. In cold wet soils, seeds can rot rather than sprout. Write down your sowing date and check the soil for emergence. If nothing has come up when it should have, consider resowing. You could rake or till the whole row or bed and start over, or you could hedge your bets and sow new rows in between the original rows. This might mean ending up with fewer rows, or rows closer to the bed edge than you like, but you will be salvaging an unfortunate situation, so it will be better than a crop failure. If the original rows do come up, you can hoe off the new rows, and it won’t have cost you that much time or money. If the original rows are patchy, hoe them off and keep the new ones.

The pros and cons of transplanting and direct sowing

Before you even venture out there to sow seeds, consider the pros and cons of transplanting versus direct sowing, and when each is most appropriate.You can read these in my post about Garden Planning

Young sweet corn plants after imperfect hoeing.
Photo Pam Dawling

How to sow a row of seeds

Find out how deep the seeds should be: bigger seeds go deeper. If you sow too deep, down where the soil is colder, the seedlings will struggle to reach the surface and may fail. Up to three times the seed diameter, is a concept I’ve often read. Not that you need to measure it!

Drag a triangular hoe (warren hoe) or the corner of a regular hoe, along the ground where you want the plants to grow. If your line is not as straight as you like, fill it in and set out stakes and twine. Either use the shadow of the twine as your mark, or eyeball a constant distance from the twine to the hoe. Remember the depth you need. Fix any deep excavations, or superficial scratches.

Preparing to sow Rainbow Chard.
Photo Pam Dawling

Next open the resealable end of the seed packet and pour some out (not over the gum!) into a small dish or the palm of a dry hand. Keep in mind the plant spacing you are aiming for. Radishes, spinach, chard and beets can easily be seen, and sown at one per inch. Avoid the beginner mistake of tumbling many more times the seed you need in the furrow. It causes more work and weaker plants, because they grow up overcrowded, and you will have to thin them. For small seeds, aim at two or three seeds per inch. Really! It’s hard to get good at this skill, but it is well worth learning.

If you mess up, don’t pick up damp seeds and put them back in the packet. They will damage the dry seeds already in there.

Use the hoe or a rake to draw soil in over the seeds to the previous soil level, not mounded up. Next tamp the soil down over the rows, using a hoe or rake on end. This lets the seeds have good contact with damp soil, so they can get the air and water they need.

Cover with rowcover if needed, or if wanted to speed up growth. With rowcover, you will be biding time while spring warms up. The cold weather crops will not benefit from being overheated. Spinach, lettuce and Asian greens will all bolt if their environment in spring is too warm. Read about factors influencing bolting. You will probably have some warmer weather crops going in and you can move the rowcover on those rows.

Use insect netting if you need to protect your vulnerable seedlings from being gobbled up. You will need to remove the netting once flowers appear, so that the crops can get pollinated. If you have serious trouble with a particular pest, look in seed catalogs for parthenocarpic varieties, ones that set fruit without any pollination.

If it doesn’t rain, water the next day (day 2), then whenever the soil surface is dry. It is better to water deeply less often, than to water lightly each day. Light watering may simply not be enough, and will encourage the seedlings to make shallow roots, which will then die back if you don’t water often enough. Deep watering saves water, as a good depth of soil stays wet, and is protected from evaporation by the surface soil. Some people even go so far as to hoe very shallowly to create a “dust mulch” which prevents warm days wicking the moisture out of the soil. For most of use, this is more of a summer issue than a spring one.

Soaking and pre-sprouting seeds

Some larger seeds benefit from soaking before sowing. Peas and beans can be soaked overnight, but smaller seeds need less soaking. Be careful with beet seeds as they can easily drown and rot if soaked for too long.

Pre-sprouting can help with germination when soil temperatures are too cold or too hot for the crop to germinate in a timely way. In spring, if you presprout, be very careful not to overwater the soil until you see the seedlings emerging. This task is not as exacting as growing bean sprouts to eat. You don’t need to rinse them more than once every few days, if that.

To sow soaked or pre-sprouted seeds, first drain off the free water. If the wet seeds tend to clump together in your fingers, either spread the seeds out on a try or a piece of rowcover or similar, until the problem is solved (an hour?) or else mix the damp seeds with a dry, inert, organic dust, such as oat bran, or uncooked corn grits. Some people use dry sand, but if you have a lot to sow, you will find this quite abrasive to your fingers or to the plastic plate of the mechanical seeder.

Station-Sowing Seeds

If your seeds are expensive, or you don’t have many, or the germination is questionable, you can station sow, rather than sowing in a furrow (drill). Simply press a small divot in the soil at the chosen spacing and put about 3 seeds in the hole. Close the soil over the top. This works well if direct-sowing big crops like okra.

Using a push seeder

EarthWay push seeder.
Photo from EarthWay

If you have long rows, you might use an EarthWay type seeder. These inexpensive push seeders are very quick and easy to use, and come with a set of relatively easily-changed plates with holes for seeds of different sizes. They are lightweight and can be used at a fast walking pace.

Jang push seeder.
Photo Johnny’s Seeds

Market Gardeners will look longingly at the Jang Seeder, which is much more accurate at spacing seeds, and costs an undeniably much larger amount of money. At one time we kept our EarthWay just for carrot sowing (we grew a lot of carrots!), and we used a Planet Junior push seeder for other crops. These are heavy-duty seeders, with plates that are a confounded challenge to change over. In the wrong hands, or on the wrong day, the whole hopper and plate mechanism would fall off. Other people like them for their sturdiness and don’t have the problems I had.

Haraka seeder from Eden Equipment

Growers doing no-till seeding might be interested in the very heavy duty Haraka planter I wrote about last year. It is made in South Africa.

Gap-filling with transplants

A special application of direct-sowing is to prepare for incomplete rows emerging, by having some back-up transplants for gap-filling. We have often done this with our first sweet corn, in case the weather turns cold, or cold rain lands on the plot. Sweet corn can be successfully transplanted up to about 2” (5 cm) tall. We sowed ours in Styrofoam Speedling flats. In cold areas, some growers transplant their whole first planting.

Gap-filling in transplanted crops with station-sowed seeds

Another special application of direct-sowing is to fill gaps in rows of transplanted crops when you have no reserve, backup transplants. This only works for fairly fast-growing crops with long harvest periods. You will need to decide if your seeds will have time to reach harvestable size before the transplanted ones are pulled up.

Garden Planning

Our planning clipboards in action. Photo Pam Dawling

Garden Planning

This is the easiest time of year for many of us to plan next year’s garden. If you are in a hot climate zone, or the southern hemisphere, come back to this in six months!

The advantages of good planning are:

  • Make the most productive use of your land.
  • Use the growing season to do the planting and harvesting, without stopping to do calculations
  • Pace yourself, enjoy your life!
  • Reduce stress and confusion
  • Become a better farmer – keep good records, learn from the experience.
  • Invest in your future – Planning gets easier each year – just tweak last year’s plan.
  • For commercial growers, good planning helps you earn a good income.

Design a planning and recordkeeping system you like, so you’ll use it. There are web-based tools, spreadsheets, worksheets and notebooks. Do you prefer clipboards, computers, or photos? Build in the ability to adapt the plan if conditions change.

Web-based systems like AgSquared, COG-Pro and the smaller-scale Gardenplanner.southernexposure.com and  phone apps store a lot of information and let you make changes, which automatically transfer to other pages. But how good is your broadband service?  Could you reliably enter and retrieve information when you need it? We often have outages, and this would be just too frustrating.

We use a lot of spreadsheets. You can make your own, or copy others. During the year we follow printed sheets on clipboards – we don’t often need the computer. The program does all the calculations. You can quickly sort out selected parts of the information and rearrange it. You can print out the sheets and hang them on clipboards for daily use.

Some people use worksheets – printed pages to provide the plan and for you to enter what you do. For the computer-averse, these are good, but leave you to do the arithmetic.

Screenshot Crop Planning Cycle

The farming or gardening year is a cycle, with no beginning and no end. You can start doing better planning at any time of year, busting into the circle diagram below at any point, although I do recommend clarifying your goals before making any big changes. But the slowest season does offer the most time, and a natural break in the crops. Gather your records and notes, your seed catalogs, your maps, and all the schedules and spreadsheets you used this past year.

0. First, clarify your goals. Don’t plan a garden that is designed for someone else.

  1. The Money: If you are growing vegetables to earn a living, calculate how much money you need to support your household, and your farm.
  2. Markets: Figure how best to do that with the land and labor you have available. A CSA? Farmer’s market? Roadside stand? Restaurant sales? You’ll need an idea of prices, so do some research!
  3. Crops: Then decide which crops to grow. Choose vegetables based on demand balanced with the financial value of those crops and the practicalities of growing in your climate, with the land you have use of. I have written before about our process for deciding which crops to grow. Consider ease of growing, suitability for your farm, productivity, profitability, popularity. Provide critical mass for the whole season and a diversity of crops. Honor your crop rotation!
  4. Harvest Schedule: You might be surprised that it is recommended to next determine how much of which crop you want to harvest when. In other words, plan your Harvest Schedule before planning any planting schedules. List how much of each crop to have ready for harvest each week
  5. Planting quantities: Also calculate (from yield tables such as in Sustainable Market Farming) how much you need to plant to achieve your harvest goals. The average person eats 160-200 pounds of fresh vegetables per year (USDA); the average CSA share feeds 2 or 3 people; an annual share will need to include about 500 pounds of 40-50 different vegetables, distributed, say, once a week for 8 months and once a month for 4 months.

Add about 10%, perhaps, to allow for things not going as planned. This could lead to a surplus of some crops, which you might be able to substitute for the shortages. Consider crop spacings, as these will determine how much space each crop needs.

6. Field Planting Schedule: Next, calculate the planting dates that will lead to harvests on your desired dates. Pause to look at the work flow and reconsider if you have too much work in any given week, and if you could make a change to avoid that problem. Take into account Days to Maturity of the varieties you plan to grow, any slowing down or speeding up because of temperatures very different from the ideal spring temperatures the catalog writers had in mind when they came up with those numbers. Draw up your list of outdoor planting dates, along with varieties, row feet, spacing, notes and space to write down what you actually do.OPS

7. Seedlings Schedule: Decide which crops to direct sow and which to transplant. For all the crops you will transplant, prepare a schedule for growing the seedlings. Pause to make sure your growing space can accommodate the numbers of flats and pots you hope to grow.Seedlings Schedule

    1. Pros of direct seeding
      • Less work than transplanting
      • Less money compared to buying starts
      • No need for a greenhouse and equipment
      • Better drought tolerance – roots grow without damage
      • Some crops don’t transplant easily
      • Some crops have millions of plants! (Carrots)
    2. Cons of direct seeding
      • Uses more seed
      • Uses more time thinning
      • Occupies the land longer
      • Maybe harder to get started in cold (or hot) conditions
    3. Pros of transplanting
      • Start earlier than outside, get earlier harvests
      • Start seed in more ideal conditions in greenhouse, better germination, more fun!
      • Easier to care for new seedlings in a greenhouse
      • Protected plants grow quicker
      • Select sturdiest plants, compost the rest
      • More flexibility if weather turns bad. Plants still grow!
      • Fit more crops into the season
      • Use time windows for quick cover crops
      • Save on seed costs
    4. Cons of transplanting
      1. Extra time caring for the starts
      2. Transplant shock can delay harvest

More attention needed to watering new plants

8. Maps: Make scale maps and fill in the main crops to grow in each section, in keeping with your crop rotation. Fit the lesser crops in the spaces left.Map

9. Packing more in: If you want more than your space allows for, (including wanting to pack your crops in a smaller space, so you can grow more cover crops), then consider succession plantings, intercropping, relay planting and follow-on crops (removing an old crop and flipping the space for another crop in the remainder of the growing season). If you have plenty of growing space, including for cover crops, then you might go for an EXtensive rather than INtensive garden, and use equipment to deal with weeds.

10. Tweak Your Plan: look at the overview of your planning so far and especially look for ways to improve. Do you want to extend your season in either direction? It’s easier to get extra harvests for a month or two in fall from mature plants you already have, than it is to get harvests a week earlier in the spring. Keep your highest priorities in mind: crops for your best markets, the signature crops you are famous for, and food for your household. Perhaps an old crop is not worth keeping, if pulling it helps you establish a new crop in a timely way. Use all available space for food crops or cover crops. Be sure to transfer any changes made in one spreadsheet to the related ones.

11. Plan B: Write some notes on what you might do if something goes wrong. Keep lists of fast-growing crops, phone numbers of neighbors, articles about dealing with floods, etc. If something does go wrong, write down what happened and why, what you did and whether it was successful, and any ideas that might have worked better, so you are better prepared next year.

12. Record-keeping: be sure to keep good records so that in a year you can tweak your plan to make it better for next year. Make recording easy to do. Minimize the paperwork. Record your planting dates and harvest start and finish dates right on your planting schedule. Have a daily practice of writing down what was done that day: Planting dates, harvest start and end dates for each planting of each crop; the amount of work done on each crop; the amount harvested. Allow time to do that, without losing your lunch break! At the beginning of the winter, have a Crop Review Meeting, discuss and write up what worked and what didn’t, to learn from the experience and do better next year. If your records suggest adjusting a date next year, adjust it to halfway between last year’s plan and what seems ideal – gradually zero in on the likely date without wild pendulum swings based on variable weather.

Garden planning manual